Procter & Gamble: Data Driven Marketing to 4.8 Billion People

Joining the conversation with 4.8 billion consumers… then actually listening to them and engaging with them. Does that sound overwhelming? It could – but the world’s 2nd largest consumer packaged goods company wouldn’t be intimidated and soon 1, Consumer Place™ was ‘populated’.

Our team had the privilege of sitting down with Tim Butler, Director of Consumer Solutions, Global Business Services at Procter & Gamble. Tim described why P&G needed one environment to reach out worldwide to consumers. But first he gave us some history and details on the sheer size and complexity of this 175-year-old Cincinnati, Ohio based company.

So, yes, P&G is big and complex. But that hasn’t stopped them from delivering on the vision. “It's about serving the world's consumers. We talk about touching and improving lives and providing value with the products,” Tim told us.

It’s not a new story – the way to reach consumers has changed; gone are the days of making a big media buy and reaching 70% of your audience. Now it’s a two-way conversation on multiple channels with the added challenge of getting through the noise.

“We have business with 4.8 billion consumers, and we'd like to think that we can have a relationship with each. And yet where we were, our relationships were very fractured. With our brands and our countries, we had a lot of different methods and systems and processes to track that consumer data and the relationship. And there was really no way that we could keep on top of that. So that was really the genesis, is we looked at the opportunity across the consumers where we want to have a one-to-one relationship, and said, ‘We need a foundational capability to start driving that.’ And so the idea, which ultimately became our 1, Consumer Place™ project, was we would have a single repository of our consumer data and start to drive CRM transformation around the country.”Tim Butler, Dir. of Consumer Solutions, Global Business Services, Procter & Gamble

A Single Repository for Consumer Data

The concept of 1, Consumer Place™, is a figurative street address, bringing three critical drivers of the project together in one place. Those drivers? First, consumer data was scattered across the company, there was no single place for marketers to get data and leverage it. Second, the consumer data P&G did have was inconsistent in capturing all the touch points that a consumer would have with Procter & Gamble. The third driver was the idea of security; it was critical to have a safe, secure place for all the consumer data. “And so it's the idea of the home for consumer data. And ‘home’ connoting secure, a place you know how to get to, and a place that meets your needs. And so that's how we tackled the three components of what we're trying to drive with the name,” Tim said.

“We're a consumer packaged goods company. We're not a technology company… And for us, as we think about tackling this big global challenge of consumer data, it made perfect sense. The idea that we would try to build this out ourselves, where it's really not our core competency, and it's a massive expense to do a big-bang build and then try to figure out how to recover from there-- the idea of building it out as a service made a ton of sense, and so far very good. What we rely on Teradata for is we have agreed to KPIs and SLAs, and now it's Teradata's job to run that.” – Tim Butler

Now that consumer data was in a scalable, flexible, secure environment managers from every Procter & Gamble brand joined the Global team to launch 1, Consumer Place™. As the name suggests it’s consumer centric – not about the Pampers brand but about the mom who buys diapers. Before the relationship was between the mom and one brand, Pampers. When her children were out of diapers, the relationship was over. Now, 1, Consumer Place™ reaches out to that mom about other potential needs, beauty products and/or household cleaners. When the relationship with Pampers is over, mom is still engaged with P&G with other brands that are still relevant to her.

“The teams are all based in their countries and their relevant businesses. So that's how they stay in touch with local consumers. But as an example, what we try to do is things, like a lot of AB testing. So if we're doing email campaigns, where we can do different AB testing around a certain type of campaign, a lot of that knowledge that is transferrable to other markets. So rather than have 15 markets do the test 15 different times, we're able to do the test in one market and then share the results, and then they execute the insight out of that in their own relevant way for their market...It’s better and smart business.” - Tim Butler

The fact is what's relevant in China may be relevant in Brazil and now managers have 1, Consumer Place™ to share knowledge and react. Analysts are now paired with Brand Managers and agencies for more relevant insights.

It is all about e-commerce and digital communications so P&G ensures the messages are relevant.

Does she prefer -

Pampers.com

Rewards

Social

Related Content

To Make a Purchase

The key is no matter how she is reacting on this site – P&G monitors all of the channels to understand habits and behaviors in order to enhance the next interaction.

The option to opt out as a consumer is an important part of the relationship. Tim points out, “It's important for us to understand once she has opted out. Again, that's part of the value of the database and the technology that we have, is to manage that in a more effective way. Because if she opts out and chooses she doesn't want to continue the dialog, it's important for us to stop that.”

According to Tim this project has been ‘fun’! That’s right FUN!

“I've had the blessing for being at P&G 27 years, and I've had a chance to work on a lot of great projects, all that I felt were very transformational, all that I thought had a great value. But I would tell you this is probably the most fun I've had in my entire career. The chance to work in the e-business space, between digital marketing, ecommerce, CRM, and truly feel like you're pioneering something and trailblazing for the company, for the industry-- I couldn't be enjoying it more. Every day is a new challenge, but you see tangible results on a faster timing that you could ever have in some more traditional types of projects.”

Thank you Tim Butler and the innovative team from P&G for trail blazing Data Driven Marketing in the Teradata Cloud.

3 Responses

Gib Bassett

December 16, 2013

P&G is really showing the way for the CPG industry at large with this solution. In an industry plagued by slow growth and price-sensitive consumers, something has to change and CPG marketers have the opportunity to work with a new generation of partner in Teradata to attack these problems. Read more about why Teradata is an ideal partner for CPG in a data driven world here:

[…] to understand and interact with customers on a much more intimate scale. It’s the realization, as Procter & Gamble’s Tim Butler explains, that companies can begin to effectively manage customer relationships not simply at a corporate […]

[…] and interact with customers on a much more intimate scale. It’s the realization, as Procter & Gamble’s Tim Butler explains, that companies can begin to effectively manage customer relationships not simply at a corporate […]

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